A re-examination of production functions and efficiency estimates for the national basketball association

This paper seeks to re-examine the issue of estimating team efficiency for sports teams via an application of data from the National Basketball Association. This paper argues that the inputs the coaches allocate are the players the team employs. Therefore, this paper employs a measure of playing talent in modeling team production. Unlike previous studies, which only employed one measure of playing talent, we employ measures of guards, small forwards and big men in a study of basketball. This paper also argues that the time-varying stochastic frontier models with the identical temporal pattern assumption such as Lee and Schmidt and Battese and Coelli cannot be used in the analysis of team efficiency in sports. The evidence we present shows by hypothesis test that this argument holds.